By Gabe from Penny Arcade:More details about the Killer Instinct Pin Ultimate edition came out today. You can head over to the XBLA blog right now and read through them. You should jump over there and read them before continuing on with my post. Go ahead I can wait. I have to catch this Zubat anyway.

Back?

Okay so now you know that you can earn pins by completing in game challenges or attending in person events. You can still purchase them though if you don’t have the time or desire to do all that stuff. It’s also worth pointing out that I’m drawing all 8 of the character pins, the first of which is Jago and comes in the Pin Ultimate edition. There are another 8 engagement pins which are being designed by me and the other artists here at PA.

That makes for a total set of 16 pins which is the largest single Pinny Arcade set we’ve done to date. I’ve always said that my goal with Pinny Arcade is to create the Disney Pin trading of games. Already just in the first year of Pinny Arcade we’ve managed to get pins for some of the biggest names in the industry, indie games and fan favorites. I’m super proud of how far we’ve come in less than 12 months!

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Do you or your kids wanna dress up as a Lookout, Daughter of the Eyrewood, or Thornwatch member? If you do, send me a picture and If I get enough I’ll post a gallery here on the site. I’ll even put together a special Eyrewood prize pack for my favorites. Send me your pics before Halloween if you want in on the contest!

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:I’m really loving Pokemon X. I put about 150 hours into Pokemon Diamond back in the day but could not get into any of the games after. I tried White but it just felt to similar. I don’t know if it’s the updated graphics or the amount of time that has passed but I’m hooked on X now.

I love that the game is 3D now, it really makes Pokemon feel fresh and more like a modern RPG. The old sprites had a certain charm to them but the animations and character they have put into all these 3D models is just outstanding. I actually feel a little bad now when I see them faint. In terms of the mechanics the game also feels more modern. A lot of the old stuff that to me just felt like a punishment is gone. Getting XP for capturing, the XP share working on all your Pokemon, super training, it all goes a long way towards making the game more humane.

The upgrade to the multiplayer aspects of the game is also a welcome addition. The new P.S.S. (player search system) allows you to trade and battle with other Pokemon players nearby super easily. Also it saves so much faster now!

Today’s comic brings back evil Pokemon trainer Gabe. We’ve done a lot of Pokemon strips over the years and I thought I collect some of my favorites.

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Do you or your kids wanna dress up as a Lookout, Daughter of the Eyrewood, or Thornwatch member? If you do, send me a picture and If I get enough I’ll post a gallery here on the site. I’ll even put together a special Eyrewood prize pack for my favorites. Send me your pics before Halloween if you want in on the contest!

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:More details about the Killer Instinct Pin Ultimate edition came out today. You can head over to the XBLA blog right now and read through them. You should jump over there and read them before continuing on with my post. Go ahead I can wait. I have to catch this Zubat anyway.

Back?

Okay so now you know that you can earn pins by completing in game challenges or attending in person events. You can still purchase them though if you don’t have the time or desire to do all that stuff. It’s also worth pointing out that I’m drawing all 8 of the character pins, the first of which is Jago and comes in the Pin Ultimate edition. There are another 8 engagement pins which are being designed by me and the other artists here at PA.

That makes for a total set of 16 pins which is the largest single Pinny Arcade set we’ve done to date. I’ve always said that my goal with Pinny Arcade is to create the Disney Pin trading of games. Already just in the first year of Pinny Arcade we’ve managed to get pins for some of the biggest names in the industry, indie games and fan favorites. I’m super proud of how far we’ve come in less than 12 months!

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:Looking over at the page, it has nine or so hours left to go before it funds. They’ve got about 20k left to go on a 500k ask, so they’re close. I said I would say what was up with it, and I never did, partly because I’m a bad person but also because no that’s why.

One of Golem Arcana’s primary goals is to make wargaming something everybody can do. People at that company have already revolutionized gaming on the tabletop three or four times at my last count, so they’re good for it - but one of the things I like most about wargaming is the Arcana: that is to say, the secrets and mysteries. The tomes and chin-stroking, the unearthing of some esoteric bullshit that has within it the molecule of victory. But I still backed it, for two reasons.

The first is that I agree with its mission. I think a lot of people, including a lot of gamers, are actually wargamers who simply never had the opportunity. Painting is intimidating as fuck. What’s even more intimidating is hauling a tacklebox full of treasured minis to the “friendly local game store” to play against strangers who all seem to have slightly different levels of rigor regarding rules questions and measurement. This game, whose primary differentiator is a stylus that communicates game data and position to an impartial tablet or phone, hacks down a lot of that stuff in one fell swoop and heaps it to burn. It’s informed by boardgames, but isn’t one - it’s definitely in the wargame continuum, and a skirmishy volume of on-table plastic makes every maneuver count.

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:I wanted to talk a little more about the Pin Ultimate edition of the new Killer Instinct. The KI team originally came to us with a question. They were making a digital only game but wanted to know if there was a way to give it a cool physical component that would sort of take the place of the game box you would have put up on your shelf. We all put our heads together and what we came up with is the Pin Ultimate edition.

The idea is to go beyond just sticking a statute in the box. With the Pin Ultimate edition you get a case that when closed will look something like a hardcover book on your shelf.

When open though it becomes a tri-fold display for a custom set of Pinny Arcade pins.

There will be pins of all the characters but beyond that there will be a series of what we are calling “engagement” pins. The idea behind these was to turn things such as in game achievements and experiences like attending PAX into something physical that you can put in your display case. The idea is that you can put it up on your shelf and see pins for the KI tournament you played in, meeting the developers at PAX and maybe the challenge you did where you had to play a hundred ranked games in a month. The Pin Ultimate edition is less a “collectors edition” and something more like a scrap book.

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:I’ve got some cool Thornwatch news to share. Last time I talked about my game I mentioned that I got some great advice from Mike Selinker. He told me I needed to let someone else run the game besides me. Since I started working on it almost two years ago I have been the only one to ever GM it. Putting it in someone elses hands was incredibly scary but I did it last week. It was nerve wracking but Selinker was right, the notes I got were better than any playtest I’ve done since the first year of the game’s development.

Jamie actually approached me right after I made that last post and asked if she could run the game. You probably know Jamie from Child’s Play but she’s also an experienced D&D player and a very talented DM. She’s also been in nearly all my Thornwatch playtests and loves the game probably as much as I do.

So I sat back and tried to keep my mouth shut as she ran an adventure for a group that had never played the game before. It was a fantastic test of the game and I ended up taking a few pages of notes. It was a great way to see just how much of the game I’m still holding in my head. I learned a lot about what I need to get written down so that someone who is not me can pick this game up and run it for their friends.

Keeping my mouth shut wasn’t easy and there were a few times I slipped up and started answering questions rather than letting Jamie handle it. I think the next step is for me to not even be in the room.

So what does a “Pin Ultimate Edition” include? The Game of course but also a special series of pins designed for the game and a custom display to show off your collection. This Pin Ultimate Edition will come with the game of course, as well as two of the 16 pins in the series and a premium case that unfolds into a display. You’ll get the Jago pin and the Killer Instinct logo pin to start and we will be talking about how to get the rest of the series soon.

Here is a peek at the Jago pin you will get.

We’ve done individual pins for games already but a custom set is new and I’m really excited. I can remember using my journalism pass to leave school my senior year in high school and go play KI up at the Wonderland Arcade. I don’t remember ever actually writing a story about it for the paper but man I had a blast. Tycho and I poured a lot of quarters into that machine and the opportunity to work on this special pin series is a real treat.

You can get more details and even pre-order your copy (they are not making a lot) on the official site for the Pin Ultimate edition and like I said, we’ll be talking more about the rest of the pins and how to get them soon.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:As part of the Kickstarter we did, there were a number of Game Nights on offer, and without fail they’ve been a blast. Videogames never get played at these things. We always provide a selection, tastefully arranged, with the electronic equivalent of a tangy dip to the side. Nobody cares. Boardgames! That’s what’s up.

We have a ready supply of these, also, and there are a couple favorites that always seem to turn up: King of Tokyo with the (utterly necessary) expansion comes out a lot. Anomia is a Jamie favorite. I especially like to learn new games with people, which is how we found out that Lords of Waterdeep was way, way better than it had any right to be. For the last one we did, our guests called the game ahead of time: Battlestar Galactica. And a heap of expansions. It took an engineer almost an hour to arrange. He might tell you it was less, but he’s not telling the story, is he. Gabriel has a tendency to “drown” in games with this many pieces. I like to say that it is because “he is dumb,” but that’s not right. He’s terrifyingly smart. But if you dump a huge box of cardboard on him, and six decks of those little quarter-scale cards that Fantasy Flight likes so much, and then a a Quorum deck (!), I think he’s gonna prefer to play a game that he already knows. Whereas I put myself in situations like that on purpose! That is the strange battery which drives our empire.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:I would say that I have a complicated relationship with my father if I didn’t think that “complicated relationships with fathers” weren’t the functional default. I don’t know, maybe that’s something I made up. Maybe I’ve just self-selected a cohort messed up for the same reasons I am. He never really knew what to do with me, and I never knew what to do with him, except to use him as a counterexample. I’m still digging out the shrapnel of this policy. I used him like a die, to cut out a new person who would be in every way his opposite. If he would hurt someone with his fist, well, I would find another way. I had come back from visiting him once in the hospital and I was too out of sorts to make toast. I couldn’t figure out the toaster. I was pushing buttons but I wasn’t really looking at them, and I realized that I had done a good job making an anti-him in most places but he was the one who taught me to love games. He taught me how to play chess when I was four on a beautiful pewter chess set he got when he was in Germany, the same one house guests would eventually leave in the rain, fusing the pieces together. You’re here looking at this because games had been useful to him and he made them invaluable to me. He was the oldest of eleven kids; in a house like that, games were probably a blessing if not an explicit survival tactic. He had brothers and sisters young enough for me to play with, and we did: they taught me about Dungeons and Dragons, which I never really stopped playing, regardless of what I might have told my mother. They had a game that was like Hide and Go Seek, you played it in the woods, except it was more like Seek and Go Hide. One person hid, but they would leave clues behind them they had torn out of a little notepad. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:I’m far, far less permissive than my own father was - also, less permissive than Gabriel, apparently. My son thinks “bottom” is a bad word, and I haven’t corrected him.

I don’t talk about it as much, I got distracted, but I am still given to the occasional Kickstarter freakout. There are some projects and trends that I think about a lot, and then I remembered that I have a website where I can discuss exactly those kinds of things.

A successful campaign on Kickstarter is now the beginning of the process. Creating a “target” to shoot for has a ton of strategic considerations aside from making a game, because at the bare minimum you have to pay the digital equivalent of Caesar just for having met your goal. You want it high enough so that you can do whatever you said you were gonna, but because you don’t get anything if you don’t make the target you start seriously budgeting a life where your sustenance derives primarily from bulk ramen.

“Early Access” programs on Steam I expected to be somewhat rare, but then Namco Bandai did it…? So I think maybe this is the world we live in now. Kickstarters segue into some kind of Early Access on Steam or anyplace else, which is nice, because that money from the initial crowdfunding gets spent fast. Even in the age of distributed patronage, you’re taking your life into your hands. Getting your idea to this point might already have you up to your neck in soil. < article continued at Penny Arcade >